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Cameron is just tip of the EU’s problems

There are others among the EU’s big four that are trying to change the status quo.

The sight of David Cameron speed-dating European Union presidents has a transfixing quality. Here is a man threatening divorce, yet at the same time seeking to rewrite the terms of the pre-nup.

Over the course of Friday, he had to smile before the cameras with Jean-Claude Juncker, whom he had previously tried to block from becoming president of the European Commission, and then with Martin Schulz, president of a European Parliament that he has previously scorned. Ironies pile upon further ironies. A visit to London Sunday by Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, must have come as a blessed relief.

As spellbinding as Cameron’s contortions are, they do not tell us much about the state of the European Union. They simply confirm what has been known for many years: that the U.K. is part of the EU, but not “at the heart of Europe.”

The phrase “at the heart of Europe” was cheapened over the years by various British politicians. John Major, having taken over from Margaret Thatcher as prime minister at the end of 1990, pledged to put the U.K. at the heart of Europe. His successor Tony Blair claimed to have done so. And those of an unforgiving spirit might recall that in 2010, William Hague, who was then Cameron’s foreign minister, said he would put Britain at the heart of Europe (that was in the context of a plan to send more British civil servants to work in Brussels, which did not materialize, possibly because the civil servants had no wish to commit professional suicide).

Setting aside such vainglorious aspirations, which may or may not have been sincere, everyone is agreed that the British are not at the heart of Europe (and arguably never have been, at least not since 1945). The more intriguing and troubling question at this particular juncture is to ask: If not the British, who is at the heart of Europe?

The answer used to be obvious: France and Germany leading the way, with the other four founding nations of the EU — Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg — keeping in step. Some might have added Ireland, which joined the EU in 1973, and perhaps even Spain and Portugal. (In various ways, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Austria kept their distance and few thought of Greece as at the heart of Europe.)  That was the kind of thinking underlying a comment from Jacques Chirac, the then president of France, who said in February 2003 of the countries that were about to join the EU but which had dared to criticize the imminent invasion of Iraq: “It is not well-brought-up behavior. They missed a good opportunity to shut up.”

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Those certainties have long since disappeared. Plotting the loyalty of individual member countries to the EU cause is no easy task, even for the founding six. Perhaps unquestioning loyalty is still to be found in Luxembourg and Belgium. Dutch government politicians are, for the most part, still instinctively pro-EU, but now prone to voicing stinging criticism of the EU — accusing Brussels of undue interference.

Matteo Renzi has been prime minister for only two years (admittedly a long time by Italian standards), but already he has picked a series of confrontations with the EU. It was not the style of his predecessors to throw their weight around in Brussels. In the case of Silvio Berlusconi because he was both indolent and devious, while Romano Prodi and Mario Monti were both more courteous and pro-EU. Renzi is naturally more combative. Additionally, he puts his national politics first and judges that confrontation abroad may help him domestically.

In recent weeks, as well as replacing Italy’s permanent representative to the EU (perceived as being too soft), Renzi has held up an agreement on providing funding for Turkey to help her cope with an influx of migrants from Syria — in turn this is supposed to reduce the pressure of migration on the EU. Italy’s objections were nothing to do with the migration proposal — indeed Renzi has been arguing for the EU to come to Italy’s aid. Instead, Renzi was using the Turkey proposal to leverage concessions from Germany and the European Commission.

Last week, Renzi declared that he had secured the agreement of German Chancellor Angela Merkel for greater “flexibility” in assessing Italy’s compliance with EU fiscal rules. Whether there have been concessions is disputed and as yet untested, but optimists see this as a happy resolution. Pessimists warn that Renzi has learned the value of holding the EU hostage.

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Less obviously, but perhaps just as destabilizing, Germany has been rocking the boat too. Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister, is calling into question the EU’s budget in ways that shake the assumptions on which other member countries decided to join the EU. Schäuble’s line, spelled out at a European Commission conference in September, and repeated at a German government event in Brussels in January, is that the migration crisis intensifies the need for a complete revamp of the EU’s budget.

Schäuble is viscerally pro-EU, but he regards the migration crisis as a complete game-changer, for both Germany and the EU. He does not believe that business-as-usual is either possible or desirable. This is a man who, having been at Helmut Kohl’s right hand in the  late 1980s as the Soviet empire collapsed, went on to sign the treaty on German unification in 1990. For him, just as West Germany had to adapt its economy to the shock of unification in the 1990s, so Germany and the EU must change to meet the migration challenge.

He is arguing that EU money should be spent only on what the EU states have to do together. It should not be replicating or replacing what a state can do alone. So border controls and migration policing are in, along with environmental and energy policies, and foreign affairs. However, most agriculture and cohesion spending wouldn’t meet the cut.

Additionally, just to make the medicine even more unpalatable, Schäuble has declared that he wants to make receipt of EU money conditional on member countries implementing agreed economic reforms.

“To be quite frank,” he said in that September speech, “I propose to use the money that is spent for cohesion policy and parts of the agriculture budget to support reform efforts in the member states. The national projects which benefit from financing from the European funds should be systematically designed to implement the country-specific recommendations. The Commission needs to make this the precondition for financing national projects.”

He argues that in the EU’s next multi-year spending cycle (2021 onwards), there should be more flexibility about where to assign spending — and by implication a significant reduction in spending on traditional areas.

Just as remarkable in the January speech is Schäuble’s warning that it may be necessary to depart from EU unity and unanimity: “We should not stop looking for innovative solutions. This could mean that we need to assemble a coalition of the willing. A coalition which is able to tackle the most urgent problems.”

Granted, Schäuble has a long history of outspoken rhetoric, and there will be some people who regard these speeches as posturing, and who will comfort themselves that he is unlikely to be on the political scene in 2021. But equally there will be others, particularly those who sit round the table with him at meetings of eurozone or EU finance ministers, who will be keenly aware of a significant shift in German government thinking.

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What matters is that the biggest countries cannot be described as having a cohesive and coherent position on the EU. Germany and Italy are, for very different reasons, rocking the boat. France under François Hollande is preoccupied with its domestic politics and the struggle to improve economic performance. Spain is paralysed by an inconclusive parliamentary election. Poland has just elected a conservative government that is in dispute with the European Commission over its respect for democracy and the rule of law.

If those European presidents whom Cameron has been speed-dating dared ask themselves which countries now give unquestioning loyalty to the EU, how much further would the list go than Belgium, Luxembourg, the Baltic states, and Ireland?

Which surely adds another fascinating layer of complexity to the Brexit mix. There are various member states that are plainly dissatisfied with the EU in its current condition, yet this does not make Cameron’s task of changing the EU-U.K. relationship any easier. On the contrary, it means that those negotiating with Cameron — the likes of Tusk, Juncker and Angela Merkel — are less certain about what they can deliver. It means that Cameron’s counterparts round the European Council table are less sure of their allies and therefore less willing to make concessions now for the sake of rewards in the future: fear erodes generosity.

The temptation, in the coming weeks, will be to fix attention on Cameron and his domestic rivals, to look for unreasonable behavior that might be evidence of irretrievable breakdown in relations between the U.K. and its EU partners.

But, as the negotiations intensify, keep an eye also on relations between the rest of the EU’s biggest states. And, when Cameron demands exemption from any aspiration to “ever closer union,” be alive to the irony.